Notes1: This started out as a prequel to In These Hands, I Carry the Apocalypse, but this story was written to be more in line with the events from the Three Sisters comic (in direct opposition to the previous, which was done before the Windrunner reunion). Greymane was also intended to show up, but he was more or less window dressing and not very active in the brainstorming process. I toyed with the idea, between having him just be a quiet bystander to coincidentally turning up everywhere Alleria went before eventually getting to the nitty-gritty and see what's what, but none of that went in any particular direction other than what's already been stated in the follow-up; if anything, it'd probably be more somber, but more or less the same.
I had also entertained with concepts of showcasing Sylvanas and Alleria as little kids a bit more, but I think this is good enough for now. It's a strange thing, really, to think about, because we don't really know about the Windrunners all that much beyond their stations in the present and in the past. You at least know that the Ranger-General position might be a hereditary thing (not that this has been confirmed, but speculation on WoWpedia tends to believe that, until the Fall of Quel'Thalas, all RGs were Windrunners dating back to their forefather, Talanas), that their mother died before or during the Second War (there are a few statements that conflict each other as to when this happened), and finally seeing what Lirath looks like after all these years (and as an adult, because I always imagined him as this little kid that was way younger than the rest of the girls). It's not as much as what we already know about the Stormrage brothers (their parents seem to be people of very nondescript origin, but it would be hilariously ironic if, by some chance, they are still alive, became Nightborne, and joined the Horde), but I have been of the mind that the Windrunners are going to eventually develop into parallel equivalents of not only Illidan and Malfurion but Tyrande as well.
...On the other hand, it's kind of difficult to hold an intelligent discussion - at least on r/wow, given the current FotM circlejerking there - about the Windrunners that isn't rife with memes about the high elf/blood schism (I have yet to receive an answer on what Alliance High Elves should be called), one-track closemindedness on black and white morality regarding actions that concern militant decisions and personal connections in life and undeath, and choosing humans over elves as lifelong companions (I myself don't ship Sylvanas/Nathanos; I always felt the nature of that has some element of ambiguity). So I don't think I'll be ready to talk about Sylvanas herself just yet; I'll save that discourse for when the time is right. As much as people are baying for her blood outside of the game, I don't see her dying anytime soon, especially if the trend continues that each of the BfA Warbringers have become raid bosses (so far).
Notes2: I used Primitive Technology's video "Bow and Arrow" as a reference to detail the process of making an arrow. I probably got a couple details wrong, but this is about as close as I could get to finding YouTube videos of crafting an arrow by scratch.
Notes3: The ending gave me the most trouble, because there were many different ways I could have capped it off. One involved having Greymane appear at the very last second (this would've made the transition incredibly jarring, since Alleria was going to low-key bail out of whatever he was going to say just as he was about to get started). Another had a scene that showcased Alleria's thoughts, in which she swore to compete with everyone in Azeroth to land the killing blow on Sylvanas with the arrow she made, but as mentioned in Note 1 this would conflict with the characterization present in In These Hands, I Carry the Apocalypse even if it coincided more with her current disposition toward Sylvanas shown in the Battle for Lordaeron cinematics. Sadly, I hadn't taken into account the reaction she might've had regarding not only the loss of Forsaken life at the Gathering in Arathi (she called them 'rotbrains' in Before the Storm) nor the Burning of Teldrassil, which is ultimately not present in this story, so it's going to have to addressed in another one-shot.
It's very simple, making an arrow. Time-consuming and tedious, but well worth the effort put into it (and much more satisfying; the feeling isn't quite as intense and self-fulfilling when a fletcher does it for you).
The inner city docks have been working full-time, and as a result have pushed the deep sea fishermen and boaters further out west where the noise is not so deafening for their catch to hide from. Alleria has taken walks along the pier, but each day there are more 7th Legion soldiers running their drills under Shaw's watchful eye, each day there are more people lining up with papers in their hands: humans and dwarves, gnomes and draenei, worgen and pandaren.
Each day, she sees more and more night elves. They hit the training dummies harder than the others with their blades and the blunt ends of their maces. They stand farther away from the rest of the gunners and strike the targets draped in shabby, tattered sacks painted in blotches of red and black. They sit a little more apart from their comrades at the tents, tightening their bowstrings, whetting their knives.
She's only seen Tyrande once, staring off into the distance across the sea. She doesn't go to her. She has no intention to.
When it becomes clear the traffic won't die down and the druids aren't moving from the shallows, Alleria decides to go east. The paths have gotten more crowded, louder. It grates her ears and makes her thoughts less noticeable.
She lets her feet carry her, past the Cathedral of Light, past Old Town, past the Trade District, until she's standing in the thickets outside the gates leading into Stormwind City, off to the side from the beaten path where the cavalrymen march rank and file up from Goldshire and onto the bridge.
In the shadows between the trees, several pairs of glowing blue and yellow pinpricks flicker across the field. Accompanying them, the chuffs of breath and bestial, lupine growls of a pack on the hunt.
She turns away, takes a look at the reeds. Reaches out and gently pulls one toward her between two fingers. The wood is hard, pliable, but bends stiffly at her touch. Applying a little more pressure doesn't cause it to crack and break, either.
Alleria feels the ones in the back that grow up by the wall. Some of them snap, loud, dry pops. She lets these fall to the floor and puts her hand around the reed. Tugs once, twice. It stays firm in the ground.
Nodding, she removes her dagger from her belt, eyes the stalk, and cuts it off close to the root.
She goes back to the house in Old Town, the door falling with a soft, heavy breath. It's a quaint little abode made in the same architectural style and affair that make up this part of Stormwind: wood floors and paneling with arched ceilings. To her right there's a little sitting area with a couple sofa chairs and a coffee table. Up ahead and off to the left, wrapped around the corner, is the kitchenette. Behind her, the stairwell winds up to the second floor where the bedrooms are.
Rhonin had purchased it for him and Vereesa, sometime after the boys were born. They would come here every other summer and winter during school recesses in Dalaran, although Rhonin's visits were less frequent when his duties required him to be present among the Council of Six for long periods of time. Even Arator had started coming here now and again, shortly before the Legion invasions when the Sons of Lothar finally got through to whatever bureaucrat was keeping them in Hellfire after all these years.
No one is here now. Turalyon is with their son at Light's Hope Chapel in the Eastern Plaguelands—longer than they said they would be, and Vereesa took her and the boys back through the portal to Dalaran as soon as possible once word reached the city.
On top of the coffee table, lined up in a neat row inside the self-made circle her belt has made, are her tools. A pouch for smoke bombs. Another for blinding powder that explodes on contact. A thumb ring, carved from a talbuk's horn and shaped by lightforged jewelcrafters.
Her knife.
She takes it from its place in the center, flips it around, and draws it out. Holds it up to the daylight pouring in through the window and turns it slowly to the left, then slowly to the right. She watches, rapt, as the glare winks at her from its tip and buoys up and down the spine with childish enthusiasm. The blade is silver as the ore excavated from the Underlight Mines, its handle inlaid with dragonhawk scales and wrapped in lynx leather for a more comfortable grip.
For you, Ranger-General, she hears her say...and she wanted to tell her she had no intention of taking up the mantle. She did not want to be confined here, behind the walls of the estate or Silvermoon—any town, really, if she wanted to be thoroughly specific. She would find out later, and so would Mother, and later on when she would be stationed at one of the outposts and the postmaster would come by with their mail she would read in Vereesa's letters how much fretting there was to be had, how much she'd hear their sister scoff and deny there was anything wrong, how much she insisted Alleria would be stupid to discard such a lovely gift she spent half her savings on to have made, she really, really wouldn't...would she?
Alleria lowers the knife and stares at it for a long, long time.
(Of course she wouldn't toss it away. It is still the best gift she could have gotten...and still the loveliest.)
She slams it home into the sheath, ties on the belt, and clips the pouches together.
(It's perfect.)
Reed in hand, Alleria goes out the door and makes her way north—through Old Town, through the Dwarven District, into the Wollerton Stead. She takes her time, though; why rush? The sun is shining, there is nary a cloud in the sky. There is a song in her heart and a low, aching ember nipping at her heels.
All things take fruit in due time.
Some of the night elves look up when she arrives and watch her as she crosses the field, minding her steps where the druids are hard at work. There's a flat rock jutting out from the lip of the bank, where mud and grit meet the water. With all the magically enlarged pumpkins, cobbled campfires, and makeshift tents proliferating the area, that particular rock—of all other rocks that are to be had in the Pond—stands out the most, plain, grey, and very unassuming.
It's also unoccupied. Whether or not people don't feel like fishing or have no interest in loitering around it, Alleria doesn't know. Nor does she care. She takes her place upon it, one leg draped over the other, and takes out the knife.
Blade in one hand, reed in the other, Alleria bends her head down and sets to work.
Making an arrow is very simple, tedious and time-consuming it may be. But there's a charm to whiling a small portion of your day away on a task that demands your patience and respect for the craft you are devoted to. You have to peel the skin off the reed very carefully; cut too deep and you'll break off parts of the wood, cut too thin and you'll be wasting more time trying to skim the bits and pieces of the film with the tip and not the edge; a small rock would better suffice. Then, once the shoot has been laid bare, comes the part in which you must carve the end of the reed you want to have as your point at near-perfect symmetrical angles with the utmost careful precision. Easy strokes, slow strokes if you are not quite used to the grip of your knife and are as meticulous as trying to get the thread through the needle, or quick strokes if you are confident in your ability to get the sharpness and general geometry just right. Perfection is subjective, but satisfaction in a job well done is the ideal—sublime and transcendental for the soul.
She sets the knife down and raises the arrow, laid flat against the palms of her hands, up to her eyes, turning it this way and that.
Yes.
Yes. It's beautiful. Lovely.
This will do.
But it's not done. There are feathers that have to be found, measured, and glued onto the end of the shaft. She would prefer a dragonhawk...but she just as easily quashes the thought as soon as it comes to life. A Wildhammer gryphon? Or perhaps a void hawkstrider?
Or, maybe…?
Well, she'd just have to ask, and that's what she does when she fetches the rest of the supplies: an arrowhead, some twine, tree sap from one of the Ancients keeping watch by the ramparts, a gnomish lighter.
When she posits the question to one of the Sentinels, she expects her to say no or make up an excuse that supplies are in hot demand and short in stock. Then the woman asks for Alleria to hold out, reaches into her own utility belt, and offers her three long, purple hippogryph feathers bound together. "Here," she says. "Send her my regards. Make it count...before someone else does."
Alleria doesn't respond to that, just simply thanks her for her help and goes back to the rock to finish the arrow..
It doesn't take too long to pluck the feathers from the vanes nor attach the head over the tip and adjust it so it gels with the Ancient's sap, but unlike most tree sap, most likely due to its age, it is much slower to dry and settle. She sets it aside for a moment and messes with the lighter's wheel. It takes three-three and a half quick snaps of her thumb to finally get the flame to sputter and stabilize, so when she's certain it's not going to die she undoes the binding on the feathers and plucks one between her fingers.
She doubles over and, moving from one end to the other, carefully brushes the lighter across the vane.
Mother used to have them practice making arrows, when they were little girls. For a couple years it was just the two of them, sitting side by side with a bundle of sticks foraged from the river and tools she would have bought from the local supply shops or whatever she had in her office at home. She would show them how to carefully pull the feathers off the barbs, where to find the best spots in the trees to tap at for resin and where to apply it on the shaft, which stones to use to split the wood with to put the arrowhead in; and then she would sit back and watch them fumble and struggle with getting the raffia threads around the end to stay on and the knot just tight, widen the crack in the shaft more than they intended, scorch their fingertips with the tips of the sticks they chose to put to the campfire Mother had made when they tried to sear the edges of the feathers into angular flairs. She would show them once more, and then she would lean back and observe them with keen eyes as they attempted to mimic the motions in the stilted, marionette articulations someone young and full of energy had yet to learn by rote of mundane, mind-numbing repetition. It would be several months before the two of them could manage not to blister their fingers or stick themselves with splinters, and many more before they could fletch properly, fix the arrowheads firmly, and keep the knot secured enough for the twine to not fall apart. They were proud, they were glad. They showed Father the arrows they made and showed off in front of him and Mother with their piddly little bows how well (how terrible) they could shoot the bull's-eyes hanging over the straw dummies Mother had erected in the backyard for when she would come home from her journeys abroad Eversong and would practice in the falling cloak of eventide. They would practice and practice and practice until it became as easy as getting out of bed and changing into their day clothes, and they would practice and practice again once Vereesa was old enough to get her own toy bow and they too could watch her fuss with the twine and have her fingers get bit by the hungry campfire and have a row over the way the tips of her feathers curled up (by Darkness, they practically burned to the very last centimeter) or why all the resin was sticking to her when it should be on the arrow itself. Then she too would practice and practice and practice until she could keep up with the two of them and partake in the daily ritual of hitting the sweet spot on the target dummies. It would continue all the way into their girlhood and persist into their years at the Farstrider Academy, outshining all the others, hawks hunting among whippoorwills. The sky was theirs. They saw what lay thick in the fens and sedge the sunlight would not touch. They could catch the motes dancing in those slants and read every arch and curve that slunk and slithered and charged in the shadows that had names but were formless, faceless. Nothing could escape them.
They were Windrunner.
Alleria sits up and stares at the arrow in her lap.
"Show me how far you can shoot that," the young woman told her, once. They were in the woods, far from home, far from the nearest Farstrider outpost. They stood upon the white sands of the beach that overlooked the passage of the ships coming and going from the Sunsail Anchorage. The tide was low. The murlocs had long since learned to keep their distance.
She recalls the way she looked at her, brow raised, ears flexed in question. Then she snorted and smiled, and said, "But you already know."
"Let me see it again," the woman said. She gestured at the stretch of ocean with a grandiose sweep of her arm. It was all sun and clear, crystal blue, not a cloud in the sky. "Nothing's in the way. Anywhere will do."
"Alright then," she said. She drew one of the handcrafted arrows from her quiver, knocked it to the string, and took position. The arrowhead pointed straight ahead, toward the endless horizon. Her limbs did not strain. Her fingers were drawn tight around the shaft.
Then she let it loose. It whispered up, up, into the air, with an avian whistle that faded on the breeze and became lost to a world they could not see.
The woman at her side grinned, a sliver of white against the shade her hand made to shield her eyes from the sun. "Look at 'er go...You're going to put fear into so many hearts someday."
"I just do what I do best," Alleria said. "There's no room for second or third best among us Windrunners, you know that."
"That's why you'll make one of the finest Ranger-Generals in all of Silvermoon," said the woman. "There's not a doubt in my mind, and I won't take no for an answer. It's in our blood, after all. No other person can outshine us unless it's another Windrunner. You hear?"
Alleria shot her a lazy salute. "Loud and clear, Captain."
"I mean it! I can see it now. You'll be the likes that which hasn't been seen since Greatfather Talanas! So long as you—we—are around, and Thas'dorah is in our hands, Silvermoon will never fall."
But I bet we never imagined what it'd be like to have it fall not only to the Scourge, but to the Horde as well. Alleria's fingers curl around the arrow shaft. We didn't think about the what-ifs back then, and we don't think about the what-ifs now.
She runs an index finger up, from the butt of the shaft to the tip of the arrowhead. Stops it just there and lets it linger.
What would it have been like, had she not gone through the Portal?
What would it have been like, if she had been there when the Scourge came?
What would it have been like?
No different than usual, the Void croons in her ear. You two are so much more alike than you would care to admit.
Her grip tightens, her brows knit together.
I am not a monster. I will never be a monster.
You need not be an abomination for your brain to be rot-riddled. Are not all the heroes of your valiant Alliance paragons of virtue? Do they see as the Horde sees? The Void chuckles. How sweet and succulent the forbidden fruit tastes. The longer you let it sit, the more flavor your tongue shall receive. What a rush it will be!
Will be!
(Will it be?)
She breathes in, closes her eyes, and remembers: the soft, beguiling smile as her hand linked with hers; the chill that caressed her skin and crept up her body in such close proximity; the proud, straight back she walked that Alleria walked among the Farstriders, among the Alliance, among the Army of the Light in their beauty and arrogance; the way she spoke, high and lilted and gay, just as she spoke when they were children, when they were students, when they were women of power.
Then she remembers the way she tore the shade in half, the way her teeth were bared in an animal, inhuman snarl as its innards exploded from its body and splashed to the ground before evaporating in electroplasmic vapors. The way the dark, insidious magic surrounded her and the way the stink of death and rot around her amplified tenfold until it became a veritable wall of rage, no despair, a wall that clashed against the unstoppable, gluttonous maw of the Void that clung to Alleria as a second skin—clashed, and thrashed, for neither could find a foothold to overcome the other.
At least you had a choice! I, however, had no such say!
I did not ask to become this!
Alleria lifts her gaze and studies the encampment. The night elves and the worgen gathered around their tents and cooking fires, face sunken and faraway. Staring into the flames, stirring the pot with dreary abandon, sharpening knives on nicked, notched whetstones. Volunteer farmhands loading pumpkins into carts and wheelbarrows while harvest-witches and druids planted more seeds in the soil and silently urged them to keep growing.
The anger, the barely restrained despair, on that woman's face, reflected in her own.
She turns back to the arrow and her finger on the tip of the arrowhead. The shaft. The fletchings. The craftsmanship.
It's missing one more thing.
Alleria watches as the little bead of blood wells up around the skin and spills over the sides, down the spine.
Do you dare? the Void asks her with pernicious glee. Do you?
She applies more pressure, and more blood comes out.
On my word as a Windrunner, she begins, and the oath lingers. Becomes ephemeral, everlasting, eternal….